With a magisterial inquiry getting under way on Wednesday into the death of Farhat Ahmad Dar (21) at Nayidkhai village in northern Kashmir, allegedly in police firing on March 14, authorities in Bandipore district have acquired two important video clips. Around 6 p.m. that day, an armoured police vehicle pulled in due to a mechanical fault. A group of men, apparently in their 20s and 30s, who gathered in the village for a protest demonstration, captured the vehicle, possibly abandoned.
There was another police vehicle as also a posse of men in combat fatigue standing 50 yards in the rear. According to some residents, the local Station House Officer was present at the spot.
An amateur video shot shows over a dozen men — some in Pheran and others in sweater — seizing the surveillance-cum-patrol vehicle. They hit it with stones and wrench off its wire-mesh shields. With sporadic gunshots fired in the air from some direction, the youth get haystacks, push them into the bonnet and set the vehicle aflame.
The video clip accessed by The Hindu shows the attacking men calling out to others loudly, commanding them to rain stones on the two police vehicles in the rear. As one group keeps shouting “Jeevay Jeevay Pakistan,” a youth in a striped sweater mounts one of the vehicles to celebrate ‘victory’. He is promptly followed by another youth, wearing a Pheran and blue jeans. The ascending crescendo of the slogan is silenced with a gunshot that brings down cheering Farhat Dar.
Another amateur video shot shows a group of angry residents making a desperate attempt to rush the injured young man to hospital. “He is still alive, get a vehicle, get a vehicle”, cries one in the group. With blood gushing out of the chest, the youth in blue jeans dies on the road. “He has passed away. He has attained martyrdom,” someone in the group cries.
